Merchandising is a necessary discipline for retail sellers. It includes the pricing, advertising, packaging, and other factors known to effect customer behavior in regard to a product. One aspect of merchandising is the proper display of a product. Proper display of a product, or visual merchandising, is known to increase the sales of that product as customers are more disposed to purchase attractive looking product. Manufacturers and wholesalers are known to collectively spend billions of dollars each year to study and develop presentations, ad displays, Point of Sale (POS) displays and other aspects of visual merchandising in an effort to promote the sale of product and enhance brand imaging in the eye of the consumer.
One aspect of visual merchandising is lighting. Lighting displays may be simple, such as merely illuminating the product, or they may be more elaborate, using colors and patterns to attract a potential consumer's attention to the product. In any event, any use of lighting in visual merchandising requires power for the lighting. However, in many retail settings, in particular grocery and other similar settings, getting power to a particular display may prove difficult. Most grocery shelves are situated on long merchandisers known as “gondolas.” These gondolas are usually the only structures in the middle of an otherwise empty floor plan—forming the aisles of the store. They are intended to be only semi-permanent and can be moved. As such, they have no major connections to the environment around them. This includes power connections. While certain gondolas may happen to be close to an outlet, there is no guarantee of such convenience. As there is usually no power in the central retail area of the store, any POS or other visual merchandising display which requires lighting or any other aspect which requires power, must then be battery powered. This increases the cost of such displays as they must be both designed appropriately and have an additional component. There is also no way to effectively add additional light to a current display of product on a regular gondola and an additional POS must be developed for even that simple alteration.
One thing needed, then, is a way to route power along a gondola and have that power easily accessed. When this is accomplished, simple lighting systems, or other enhancement devices, may be utilized to access the power and provide lighting anywhere along an existing gondola with no additional POS design or alteration. Other power utilizing merchandising techniques may be developed with the power system in mind, thereby reducing cost in the design and manufacture of such displays.
Some embodiments provide a structure and apparatus by which power may be routed along a gondola. Ideally, power access strips are positioned such that power may be accessible at any point along the gondola. Enhancement devices such as light strips are then provided such that each store may readily move these enhancement devices from one area of a gondola to another as different product is emphasized, either due to manufacturers paying for enhanced lighting of their native in-store display or when the retailer desires to promote a product. It is known that merely lighting a display will enhance consumer interest, so providing lighting becomes a cost-effective method to increase sales volume without necessarily decreasing product retail price.
Various embodiments disclosed herein may allow for powered displays to be utilized in the underserved (in regards to power) central area of a retail floor plan in a manner that is easily retro-fitted to existing merchandising structures.